OutGrowth

Shanice Webb is all about helping individuals and organizations innovate, grow, and thrive in their work. Through principles of design, Shanice can guide you in tackling challenges, unlocking creativity, and achieving meaningful outcomes. Her mission is simple: to support you in reimaging what’s possible in your work—and take bold, purposeful action to bring it to life.

Read more about Shanice in this month’s blog Q+A!

➡️ https://www.outgrowthtoday.org/post/building-internal-safety

I’ve spent years building and evolving a company that centers around immersive experience, believing that we need to embrace the new and the unfamiliar to discover who we are at our core and to design our future state. Novel experience in this way becomes the catalyst for rapid growth.

Understanding different communities, learning about different ways of working and living, becoming familiar with the diverse perspectives and experiences that exist right outside of our own silos - these aren’t just opportunities to expand our professional skill sets, develop our worldview and boost our cognitive flexibility. These are chances for us to explore possibility within our own trajectories.

We need to be able to go beyond our traditional ways of thinking, to get off of the conveyor belt (as I call it), and question what could be. If we don’t have new frames of reference, how are we ever to make informed decisions about our futures? I’ve always advocated that we should be intentionally seeking and even charging toward new experiences that will enrich our lives. This is what gives us a revamped lens through which to see the world, and our path in it.

Read more on Building From the Inside Out in the May issue of En Root! ➡️ 🍃 https://shorturl.at/DfYqL

Danielle Staton is the Executive Director of Jeremiah Program’s Baltimore campus. She has spent her professional career dedicated to expanding equity and access to underserved communities in educational spaces.

Over the last 15 years, she has served in several capacities that align with the two-generation model of Jeremiah Program, including Head Start and early childhood education programming, family and community engagement, college access, and workforce development.

She most recently served as the founding Senior Director of Programs with iMentor Baltimore, leading the strategy and implementation of iMentor’s school-based programming in the organization’s newest region.

Our Q+A with the inspiring Danielle is in this month’s blog feature! ➡️ https://www.outgrowthtoday.org/post/how-community-transforms

This season of spring is all about emerging from hibernation and beginning to reconnect with the outside world in meaningful ways. As we get into full swing, I’ve designed our spring issues of En Root to cover topics that can ignite our curiosity and spark our purpose, as we re-awaken interests and connections that may have remained dormant during the winter months. Specifically, I focus on topics around community and reconnection.

In March, we covered the topic of Community-Led Futures, with the help of the inspiring Amalia Deloney. I discussed how, at our core, believes in fully committing to doing the work that impacts our world by starting at the ground level, where the most core stakeholders and the greatest champions for good reside. Now, taking this one step further, how can we as individual stakeholders begin to activate our own communities?

How can we, as Danielle Staton states, see community as a verb, where we are intentionally and actively showing up and extending support, regularly? I am thrilled to feature Danielle’s story this month, along with some great resources that can get us building and re-investing in our communities, all through small, manageable moments of connection.

🌱Read the April issue ⤵️

https://tinyurl.com/5xpktvfr

highly values community. We believe in creating important cross-sector collaborations in order to elevate teams’ skill development, reimagine futures, and break free from traditional silos/ways of operating. We believe in fully committing to doing the work that impacts our world by starting at the ground level, where the most core stakeholders and the greatest champions for good reside. Community is deeply engrained in everything we are, from our philosophy to our curriculum structure. None of us can do it alone, and what would it look like to start with community, and build the future from there?

This month, to highlight community and the people doing the amazing work, I spotlighted the topic of building community-led futures. Here to showcase this topic is the talented and inspiring Amalia Deloney, Founder of Point A Studio and leader of Seed & Signal.

Read more from the March issue ➡️

https://shorturl.at/vGXWA ⭐️

Mary Kingston Roche is a former teacher and current nonprofit leader who is passionate about helping both children and adults to spark and follow their curiosity for a life of meaning, adventure, and joy. She delivered a TEDx talk on the power of our curiosity and offers speaking, workshops, and an online course to help people rediscover and pursue their curiosity. Mary gets to practice her curiosity every day through adventures with her two kids, and lives in Maryland with her family.

Mary is our featured writer in the February issue of En Root. Learn more about Mary in our monthly blog spotlight!

Using Curiosity as a Compass Mary Kingston Roche is a former teacher and current nonprofit leader who is passionate about helping both children and adults to spark and follow their curiosity for a life of meaning, adventure, and joy. She delivered a TEDx talk on the power of our curiosity and offers speaking, workshops, and an....

In my Design Thinking courses, I often reference a book entitled, ‘Multidisciplinary Contributions to the Science of Creative Thinking,’ specifically highlighting a section that discusses that idea that we are socialized out of making creative choices. In children, curiosity leads to creative thought and action, however as we age, social norms, organizational expectations, and the prioritization of efficiency over experimentation can limit our creativity. Remaining curious and giving ourselves the space to follow that curiosity is a conscious choice, and an intentional practice.

I created because I wanted to build a platform where immersive experiences could be prioritized, as a mechanism for exploration, curiosity and self-discovery. I believe that when we incorporate opportunities for moving beyond comfort to the unknown, we can not only discover meaning and purpose, but also build skill sets that will help us to succeed across fields and industries.

Curiosity is the starting point, but just like any other valuable skill set, it requires regular practice and the space to thrive. I am thrilled to focus on this topic as we launch into February, eagerly awaiting spring and a new season of growth.

🌱Check out the newest issue that hit inboxes yesterday! ➡️ https://shorturl.at/x2N6J

Amanda Doran Eby is a 15-year educator and now, consultant, who has served as a founding teacher in a brand new school, program director, curriculum writer, conference presenter, mentor, high school choice liaison, and much more. Amanda, a lifelong resident of Baltimore City, lives in Hampden with her 5 year old Arlo, twin 2 year olds, Kendall and Lincoln, and 40-year-old husband, Chas.

She is also the featured writer in our January 2026 issue of En Root. Learn more about the amazing Amanda in our monthly blog Q+A!

🌱 https://www.outgrowthtoday.org/post/incorporating-our-true-selves

No matter where we look, we are constantly surrounded by internal and external pressures to move in a particular direction, to make a certain selection of choices, and be bound to the expectations that we have for ourselves and that others have for us. Remaining true to ourselves, especially in a society that pushes us to drive toward a standard definition of career success, can feel almost impossible. That line between what feels right for us and what feels expected, necessary and even inevitable gets blurred.

When I started in 2017, I wanted to create an organization that would challenge the conventional pathway. I wanted to showcase how tapping into our purpose would guide us to career paths that would be nonlinear and messy, but meaningful. Most of all, I wanted to highlight that this process of discovery couldn't come from staying inside of our own brains, and that we needed to immerse ourselves in new, collaborative, and at times uncomfortable experiences in order to discover ourselves, build cutting-edge competencies that could lead to success in any field and perhaps most importantly, zoom out from our narrow lens of what the future can hold.

That mindset was a product of my five years of travel around the world in my 20's, and I had discovered on my own how immersive experiences that were messy, novel and challenging were actually incubators for tremendous personal and professional growth. But rather than just get on a soap box and encourage others to seek out their own immersive experiences, in 2017, I set out to build tangible (and accessible) programs, curricula and moments/days/months where students and professionals could "attend" these experiences that would not only help them to dedicated time to asking, "what now?" and "why not me," building the creative confidence we all need to reach our true purpose and potential, but would also arm them with specific soft skills that would help them to propel their careers and teams forward.

So my final word: Each of us has the power to explore, question and carve our own futures. If remaining true to ourselves and our own unique, messy path was easy, everyone would do it. But what better time than a fresh new year to start? Here's to a year of discovery.

Happy 2026 and enjoy our January issue of En Root featuring the incredible Amanda Eby of Give Them Tomorrow!

https://shorturl.at/N0sHr

Areesha Aslam is a final-year business student at IBA University and founder of Vioris Jewels. She is a member of Pk team 22, winners of the SSCCA Climate Tank Accelerator. Areesha also represented Pakistan in the U.S. for work on sustainable water solutions. This inspiring student is also our featured writer this month, who you can check out in our December issue of En Root.

🌱Enjoy learning more about Areesha in our Q+A in this month’s blog feature

➡️

Bringing Ideas to Life Areesha Aslam is a final-year business student at IBA University and founder of Vioris Jewels. She is a member of Pk team 22, winners of the SSCCA Climate Tank Accelerator. Areesha also represented Pakistan in the U.S. for work on sustainable water solutions. This inspiring student is also our featu...